Daniel Howes

State budget faceoff is absurd

With 15.3 percent unemployment statewide -- and twice that in Detroit -- you'd think the manic push to get a budget for Michigan would be tilted toward encouraging business to invest, to expand, to add jobs, preferably without fat incentives that beggar the future to pay for the present.

But no.

The game of political chicken being played in Lansing between Gov. Jennifer Granholm and Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop, R-Rochester, is less about juicing the dismal economy than it is political positioning and crafting legacies, dividing diminishing spoils and protecting friends from the real world squeeze.

Which is to say, it's absurd.

If you were an entrepreneur or the VP of a national company looking to expand in the Midwest, would Michigan's recurring budget spectacles, its chronic inability to match policy to real-world investment decisions, serve as a welcoming invitation to the Big Mitten?

The question answers itself. At what point does this apparent dialogue of the politically deaf mature from adolescence to adulthood? When does strident Republican opposition to any tax or fee increase to balance the budget compromise with the governor's strident opposition to push any kind of structural reform that would pinch her friends in labor, however slightly?

Granholm, Michigan's CEO last time I checked, needs to show by her actions some semblance of understanding for the private-sector economic implications of the way she'd divvy the state's incredible shrinking revenue. I keep looking for it, most recently on "Fox News Sunday," but she disappoints because it's not there.

Roaring into the fray two weeks after the fiscal year began -- and two weeks before the next deadline -- isn't reassuring. It's brinksmanship. It undermines the credibility of House Speaker Andy Dillon, D-Redford Township, who privately worries that Granholm's last-minute bravado will destroy his deals with Bishop and the Republicans.

Of course, undermining Dillon may be exactly the point, considering the speaker's temerity to float a one-health-care-plan-for-all-public-employees concept that Granholm's friends in the Michigan Education Association interpreted as a declaration of war (and said as much).

The truth is that both Granholm and Bishop are playing to national type right now. That's a chilling prospect considering the creeping Detroitification of Michigan, its effect on business and the nauseating stirrings of something similar nationwide.

He's the Republican who says "no" effectively, but struggles to table The Grand Compromise that could loosen labor's grip on the capital or would replicate the responsible financial management of, say, Oakland County. She's the Democrat obsessed with protecting programs considered vital to her constituencies, whatever their corrosive effect on taxpayers or private-sector business.

Sound familiar? It should, but it's a losing strategy because both sides are defining success in terms of division, which is no success at all.

dchowes@detnews.com (313) 222-2106 Catch Daniel Howes on Fridays with Paul W. Smith on WJR-760.